After a while the rumours dried up as new bits of mauvais langue displaced the news of this strange family. In school, me and my friends turned our attention to the girls in class who were sprouting breasts and wearing makeup and hiking up their skirts and swinging their bottoms as they walked. After classes, we would improve on the stories we had heard of some of these girls, but every now and again while I was reading a comic, my thoughts drifted to this invisible family. One Saturday morning I stole one of my mother’s curtain from the bottom of her dresser and headed for the road where the family lived. I crossed a ravine by stepping on a couple of river stones, as the smelly yellow stuff from the coconut factory was flowing sluggishly in the water. I walked along the riverbank dodging the prickly grugru palms and stinging nettles until I got to a shallow basin where the exposed roots of a silk cotton tree looked like huge gnarled fingers. I held the ends of the curtains tightly and dragged it across the shallow end of the basin but caught just a couple tiny guppies that I threw back into the water. I went further upstream and trawled the curtain, catching a river shrimp and a spiteful baby crab that raised its gundee at me. Once more I followed the ravine, looking for a deepish patch where there might be sardines, and if I was lucky, a couple cascadura. About twenty minutes or so later, I noticed a muddy ribbon of water that meant someone was fishing further up. I climbed onto the bank and followed the ribbon to its source, but whoever had been fishing upstream had left in a hurry. I returned the next day but it was the same story.
This went on for about three weekends (my mother by then was becoming suspicious about the missing curtains from her drawer so I had to substitute a doily) and I felt this mysterious fisherman was playing with me. One evening I shouted out, “Hello. Who there?”
I repeated the question and was about to leave when I heard from a clump of balisier, “Me.”
“Who is me?” There was no reply so I shouted once more, “What you doing here?”
“I searching for crapo-fish.”
“Tadpole? Why you catching tadpole?”
I got the answer the next weekend. “I does mind them.”
“Why? They not good to eat.”
This went on for close to a month; me asking the question and this fella answering from inside the balisier. Finally I asked him, “Why you hiding inside the bush?”
“I like it here.”
“I don’t believe you. Who could ever like a nasty place like this?”
“Okay then. I catching caterpillars.”
“That just as stupid like catching tadpoles.” I added a little taunt. “I feel you does eat them. Make a nice soup.”
The leaves of the balisier shook a bit and I heard a small chuckle. “Caterpillar soup! Who ever hear of that?” I saw the long leaves parting and he came out, almost stumbling over the knotted roots. Even though he was some distance away and the meagre light was shredded into tiny ribbons by the bamboo overhead, I felt that I had come face to face with the freakish Thing from The Fantastic Four. I grabbed my doily and ran as fast as I could.
Three days later I told my mother I was going to a cricket practice in the recreation ground. As soon as I passed the factory I retraced my route till I came to the silk cotton tree. I must have shouted hello for half an hour before I got a reply. “You don’t have to bawl so. You will frighten away all the river moroccoys.”
“Moroccoys could hear?”
“Better than me and you.”
“How you know that?”
“I have a couple as pets. And they could run real fast when nobody watching them. Climbing up tree even.”
“Bring them for me to see.”
“They don’t like strangers.”
“Just like you? Why you always hiding in the shadow?”
“From the sun. It make my skin itch and burn.”
“Why your skin like that? And what is your real name?”
“Stop asking all these foolish questions.” He retreated back to the balisier clump and said nothing after that.
During the next visit I decided I would ask no further questions but just looking at him the words spilled out. After a long silence he said he had some disease that sounded like Harlequin. I asked if had anything to do with the romance novels the girls in my class read. I believed he laughed at that, although it could have been the hollow sound made by the bamboo as they scraped against each other. He asked about the girls in my class and I dropped some names. Did I have a girlfriend?
A couple, I lied.
He asked me to describe the main one and I combined a couple of the girls in one big sexy description. Rita and Saroop daughter and Tammy who everyone called Tammyflu as she was always sniffling. Did I ever kiss her, he wanted to know, and when I said yes he asked how she tasted. Like chewing gum, I replied quickly, and just to break this long list of lies I asked once more why he was living in this swampy place. He told me he was searching for a Hogzilla. Then he changed his mind and said it was an Alligatorzilla. We began talking about comics. I told him that my favourite was the Phantom, who took his father’s role with none of the jungle people suspecting the substitution. His favourite was Green Lantern. While I was making my way out of the swamp I wondered if his choice had been made because the entire place was so green. Everything but the yellow slush from the coconut factory. I remembered that yellow was the only colour immune to his hero’s powers.
Soon we began talking mostly of superheroes. One week he changed his mind and said his favourite was now the Martian Manhunter. I tried to match that by bringing up the Watcher, who was always around whenever there was serious trouble but who could not interfere even if an entire planet was threatened. He then hit upon the Silver Surfer.
He was good at this game. During every encounter, I waited for him to mention the scaly Thing but he always selected superheroes who were not really popular but who had incredible powers. Finally he chose the Amazing Man and stuck with that. I had no idea who this character was, and it took a while before I was able to buy a comic that featured him. His real name was Will Everett and he was a black man who could transform into the substance of whatever he touched. In the comic I’d bought, he was tricked into touching glass and he was shattered but my new friend told me that the character had died a couple times before but was always revived by the comic book writers.
A couple weeks later I brought a comic featuring Crusher Creel, the Absorbing Man. This was a Marvel character and his powers were similar to the DC Amazing Man. At the end of the story, he was tricked into touching water. My friend didn’t like this character as much, maybe because he was a villain, but he was fascinated by the water death. “This is the perfect trick. Changing to water. He could be in any ocean in the world.” I had to point out that the character had died, but he didn’t buy it. “All he have to do is reconstitute.” It was a big word and I guessed he had picked it up from one of his Amazing Man comics. “These absorbing people can’t die. They just change from one thing to the other.”
That was true. We soon discovered other superheroes with similar powers. They all had obvious names like Parasite and Copycat and Chameleon, and they treated their power as a blessing and a curse. My friend explained why. “Sometimes you might touch something ugly. Or dangerous. Or something that you don’t know too much about and then begin to show-off with this new power. It easy to get tricked then.” I waited for him to say he had touched an alligator. “But still, is the best power in the world, if you know how to use it. You could beat Superman just by becoming like him.”
“But is not a real power,” I told him. “Is just imitating.”
“No, is more than that,” he said after a while. “Every time you change you keep a little dust of that substance inside you.” I had never read of that and I felt he had just made it up. I noticed too that he was talking as if he had these absorbing powers himself. I began thinking of him as the Amazing Absorbing Boy.
I kept our meetings a secret for more than a year, but during a boastful speech by the
game warden’s son about some big manatee his father had caught, I blurted out my weekly encounter with the Amazing Absorbing Boy. I told my classmates that his orange-red skin was covered with scales that were so thick, when he knocked on them, they made a hollow sound. Nothing could harm him, I said. He was as tough as an alligator. His best power, though, was his ability to control all the scaly animals in the forest, all the tattou and moroccoy and cascadura. Everyone laughed and I realized this was the kind of story we routinely made up to pass the time. I knew then I would have to get him out of the swamp.
During the following weeks I tried to tempt him with descriptions of the beach early in the morning, and Mrs. Bango’s parlour stuffed with cakes and sweeties, and all the stores at the Mayaro junction, many with comics hanging on clothesline over the hunting knives and fishing hooks, and the fancy houses being built by these American oil people; during all this time, I felt like one of these circus people who captured hairy women and wolf boys to display in cages. In the end I was glad that he resisted my traps, time and again, with his mother’s strict warnings.
My friends never swallowed my exaggerated descriptions but word soon reached my mother through the village-gram. As I expected, she hit me with her usual talk about making up fancy stories just like my father, but one morning after she had discovered the clump of muddy curtains below my bed, she asked about the boy. She listened patiently and though she didn’t say whether she believed or not, at the end of my little speech, she asked where this family got their food from, if they never came out from the swamp. The next evening I noticed a parcel with two currants roll on the kitchen table. I believed my mother had left it there for me to take for the boy and on my way to the swamp I passed by Mrs. Bango’s parlour and bought some tamarind balls and paradise plums and a couple packs of powdery chilli bibi.
In my haste that day I forgot my doily, but the minute I got to the silk cotton tree I asked the Amazing Absorbing Boy where he got his food from. He said that they fished and set traps and grew their own food. I told him I had brought a gift and he told me to leave it by the bank. The next day the bag was empty but for the ants running all over.
“How it tasted?” I asked him.
“Real nice. Better than balata and caimite.”
I felt guilty for not bringing any snacks that day and tried to change the subject. I asked if he could wear shirts. He explained that the cloth chafed against his scales. I asked if he had been born this way and he said that he had, just like his father. People used to pelt his father with stones. I believe he preferred our super-hero talk to this line of questioning and when, for two weeks, he did not respond to my call from the ravine, I felt he had decided to avoid me. But then, braps, just like that, he turned up again, standing before the balisier patch. He told me that he had been in the San Fernando hospital for some treatment. He talked a bit of his disease and said that his father, who had left him boxes of comics, had disappeared when he was seven and he never knew if it was from shame or if he had been killed. I remember pretending that maybe his father had not learned to use his absorbing powers properly.
From then on, he disappeared during the last weekend of every month. I wondered why no one had seen him and his mother on their way to the hospital and, sometimes, I imagined the drunk and sleepy passengers in the 11:30 Guaya late-bus, bawling down the place when the Amazing Absorbing Boy and his mother got on board.
When they did show up, the reaction of the Mayaro people was completely different. I was liming by Mrs. Bango parlour at the time when I heard a terrible commotion. People were shouting from their houses and dogs were barking and children were bawling. At first I thought it was another rumshop fight that had spilled onto the road, but I could hear no cussing, no egging on the fighters; this was a different sort of commotion.
I rushed with the other limers to the roadside and saw a plumpish woman, her face covered with a broad white hat holding the hand of a stooped creature. The creature was completely covered with a robe or maybe a tunic made from stitched sugar bags, and a hat that hid his face. The only parts of his body uncovered were his hands and his ankles and it was impossible to miss the alligator scales. Women ran back to their galleries, from where they called out to their children, who in turn ran back shrieking as the pair drew closer. Bill, the sergeant, was hiding behind a standpipe and even Mano the village badjohn was ducking and peeping from behind his bicycle. Then there was complete silence, even from the dogs. I believe everyone was struck by the weight of this event that they would relate years later to their children and grandchildren. It was better than an appearance by the prime minister; maybe a visit by the pope or the queen could compare. As my friend passed the parlour, his hat turned slowly in my direction but everyone was too excited to notice.
There was the same excitement during their other trips through the village, and it soon became like a little carnival, or these biannual visits by the Ministry of Agriculture people to show their films. It was a nice, free pappyshow for the villagers, who noted that they had not yet bitten or attacked anyone. Some of the villagers began referring to him as Moroccoy Man and the Cascadura and once I heard a neighbour threatening her son by saying, “If you continue coming out last in test I will make the tattou bite you duncy little head off.” However, I stuck with the name I had chosen during our superhero chats, a combination of the Absorbing Man and the Amazing Man. I never asked him about these trips and he never mentioned them, but from my school friends I heard that he had been seen wandering around the beach and other places I had mentioned to him, dressed in his sugar-bag robe. I felt he was lucky that he had landed up in a place like Mayaro, where people were superstitious and simple and excited by everything different. Where he wouldn’t be pelted, like his father. Once he said that the jellyfish on the beach looked like a dead baby and when I asked him how he knew that, he said that a few years earlier he had seen a tiny body floating in the yellow sludge from the coconut factory.
The last time I met him was at my mother’s wake. It was late in the night and I was in the little canvas tent before our house. Uncle Boysie and a few others had just left to make preparations for the funeral the next day and there were just a couple old men sleeping on the wooden folding chairs. I, too, was sleeping when I heard a voice to my back. I thought I was dreaming because at this close range, his voice sounded like someone sucking in air and suffocating. I know this will be hard to believe but, sitting right behind me, the Amazing Absorbing Boy told me a story about a woman who had been buried in a field of bullgrass and whenever the wind blew through the tall grass, people would hear the sound of her voice. Singing all her favourite songs. I guessed this was another angle to his Absorbing People stories, or maybe a version of something his mother told him after his father’s death, but for some reason, it removed a small slice of my sadness. Not that I believed him or anything, but I liked the idea suggested by his story; that there were always these little pieces left behind, dancing around and joining and connecting and forming new objects. I thought of this while I walked along the beach in the nights, gazing at the waves and trying to get my mother’s death out of my mind. It crossed my mind, too, when I returned to our house on the day of my chemistry exam.
As I said, I never saw him again, not even when I went to give him the news of my departure to Canada. I shouted and shouted by the ravine but he never showed up. I even said that my father was an inventor and he might be able to build a machine that would turn his scales into shining glass. Or maybe a new set of skin made from the rubber tree sap. He would use this skin whenever he visited the village, I bawled out to the balisier clump. I even hit on an invisible dye from the roucou tree. Still, no answer. Finally on the weekend before my flight, I left an old telescope and a single sheet of paper tucked in a balisier’s arm, where I felt he’d be sure to spot it. On the sheet was a four-panel comic book drawing of a boy touching an Eskimo and a big block of ice and a polar bear and a tree with red zigzag leaves. The boy’s eyes were big and w
ide with excitement like the people from Archie comics and I hoped he understood that it was supposed to be funny.
The minute I put up my hands and I saw everyone in class gazing at me, I knew I could not tell them this true story of my friend, the Amazing Absorbing Boy. Why? Because then I would also have to mention my first silly thought when Uncle Boysie told me he had drowned, that he would soon reconstitute; because I guessed they would not believe, or worse, would be more interested in this disease of his; because when you really got down to it, he was no more a shapeshifter than I was.
And while the class was waiting and growing impatient I discovered something about the Amazing Absorbing Boy’s favourite superheroes: I always felt their most notable traits were their colours, black and blue and silver, and they were all outsiders who were scorned and feared, but at that exact moment, I realized that all of them had been killed off over and over and over.
In the end I told the class about the lagahoos who, at nightfall, changed their human forms into that of dogs and donkeys, and terrorized all the poor villagers. Every village had their own lagahoo, and in Mayaro, ours was Amos. Everyone seemed satisfied with my answer and Latanya asked me to spell the word as she wrote it on the board.
Chapter Twenty
FIREFLIES
After this little drift back to Mayaro, my thoughts returned, more and more, to my old village. And while the bulldozers were tearing up Regent Park and this big machine with a ball and chain (just like that used by the Absorbing Man when he fought Thor) was knocking down walls; while the older people watched on worriedly from their balconies; while more committees were formed and petitions circulated; during all this time, I was in a place far, far away. In the beginning, this place was warm and humid and there were all these insect sounds in the nights, as if they were carrying on this long conversation behind our house, somewhere in the field of cassava bordered by wild heliconias with their pale yellow flowers (which from a distance looked like frozen baby cornbirds). There were little dirty rumshops close to the beach where the fishermen came to spin their stories, and a Chinese shop where bees and flies buzzed over the bags of sugar and casks of molasses.
The Amazing Absorbing Boy Page 25